What is CD Baby?

The Short Answer:CD Baby is the largest online distributor of independent music. CDBaby.com (the site you’re on right now!) is our quaint little record store where you will discover your next favorite artist.

[In•de•pen•dent: (adj.) Not having sold one's life, career, and creative works over to a corporation.]

The Long Answer:From our humble beginnings more than a decade ago as a small, one-man operation in a garage, to our current standing as the world’s largest online distributor of indie music, CD Baby has always been a company run BY musicians FOR musicians.

Inside the fortified walls of our warehouse (a virtual Wonka-world of music) in rainy Portland, Oregon, we listen to every single album we carry before it is posted for sale so that we can help you find other new artists you’ll love, too.

No distributors. No major labels. We only sell music that musicians send us directly. We ship CDs from our warehouse. We sell downloads from our site. And we also deliver our artists’ music to other download retailers, as well (iTunes, Rhapsody, eMusic, many more.) We sell you the music and then we pay the artist right away.

Cool thing: in a regular record deal or distribution deal, musicians only make $1-$2 per album, if they’re ever lucky enough to get paid by their label at all. When selling through CD Baby, musicians make $6-$12 per album and get paid weekly.

Current Numbers360,000 different albums sold by artists at CD BabyOver 3 million tracks in our digital distribution catalog$157 million paid directly to the artists